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The psychoanalysis of self psychology serves an implicit social function in seamlessly hiding the contradictions in the economic, political and cultural arrangements of our society by not analyzing them, and therefore allowing them to remain as unconscious determinants of suffering.

Freud’s thinking was also influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, which emphasized individual organisms’ competitive struggle for survival.

We can no longer operate on the assumption that the Western capitalist culture of self-contained individualism is superior to all other cultural forms and continue to encode those values in the practice of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis is profoundly influenced by and in turn influences the social, economic, cultural, and political contexts in which it is practiced. Although created as a therapy for individual suffering, psychoanalysis has also always contained important implications for the progressive development of a more humane society and has defined its cures ... See more

To survive, any society requires moral legitimization. The philosophy of liberal individualism serves to legitimize capitalism because it espouses ideals that suggest that all human rights and needs are respected under its terms. If it were generally recognized that capitalism is a system of dominance and exploitation that requires the enrichment o... See more

Arguably, liberal individualism, social Darwinism, and free-market theory are transforms of one another, deriving their basic assumptions from the same atomistic and hierarchical worldview, all containing elitist principles (meritocracy, survival of the fittest, and plutocracy) and all with the consequent stratifications of race, gender, ethnicity,... See more

Kropotkin pointed out that Darwin’s own comments regarding the survival value of the social instincts are widely ignored. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin described how animal species in which cooperation among individuals replaced competitive struggle were able to secure the best conditions for survival. He implied that, in such cases, the fit... See more

We must also include in our clinical theories the psychological misery occasioned by actual and often ongoing experiences of social oppression. In part, such socialized misery may be internalized and perpetuated by an individual’s use of mechanisms such as identification with the aggressor, dissociation, denial, and projective identification, which... See more

A traditional ego-psychology analysis typically focuses on analyzing the patient’s inner life as the main source of problems. In contrast, a relational analyst emphasizes not only the patient’s inner life, but also the mutual relational dynamics of the therapeutic interaction in the session.